“What?” I ask. “What’s been sewn together?”
“She’s sewn in here,” Audrey replies, “sewn to the fucking fish,” and there’s this terrible, brittle tone in her voice, like eggshells. I’m never gonna forget the way she sounded. And that’s when I see what the woman inside the shark is holding. The sons of bitches who’d done it to her, they arranged her hands—sewed them together, too—so that she’s cradling the thing in her palms. She seems to be holding it out to us, like an offering. Only, I know it isn’t three cops that offering is meant for. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking—hell, I’m not thinking. I’m running on shock and instinct, shit like that. I take it from her hands, that jade idol, what the fuck ever it is, and I just stand there, holding it, staring at it. You spend fifteen years on the force, and you think maybe you’ve seen evil, maybe you’ve stared it in the face enough times that you and evil are chummy old acquaintances. But I know right then how wrong I was to ever believe I’ve seen evil. That chunk of rock, not much bigger than a plum, it’s evil, true and absolute, indescribable, and I want to put it down. More than anything, I just want to set it down on the floor with the lines of red sand. But I can’t. Sounds hokey as hell, but it’s like that Nietzsche quote, the one about staring into the abyss and it staring back into you. I’m still standing there holding that thing when backup arrives. They have to pry it out of my hands.
As for Esmé Symes, one week later she hangs herself with an extension cord. She was brought in twice for questioning, so I think she knew she was the closest thing we had to a suspect, that she was in the department’s sights. The DA’s screaming for blood. And her apartment, it’s fucking wallpapered with sketches of that goddamned jade atrocity, right? Dozens and dozens of sketches, from all different angles. But she doesn’t leave a note, not unless you’re gonna call all those drawings a suicide note. You ask me—and I know you didn’t—but you ask me whether she was involved or not, and all I got to say is Miss Esmé Symes got off easy. She got off scot-fucking-free.
4.: Creature → Feature ← Comforts
(Arbor Hill, Albany, New York, June 7, 2028)
There’s a game that they play, Ellison Nicodemo and the psychiatrist. She tells him a lie, and he patiently makes like he doesn’t know that she’s lying, no matter how outrageously, how egregiously the lie contradicts some previous lie that she’s already passed off as the truth. They have arrived at the simple rules of the game by a silent, unspoken gentleman’s agreement. It’s true no one will ever win, at least not fair and square, but—she tells herself, whenever she feels up to pretending there’s a bright side—the most she’ll ever lose is one hour every two weeks, and, after all, she’s got time to burn. If time were money, Ellison Nicodemo would be Scrooge McDuck. She can afford the pantomime.
Exempli gratia:
It’s five past two on a Monday afternoon and Ellison sits on the wide, slightly threadbare corduroy sofa in the psychiatrist’s office, wishing, just like always, that she could get by without the charity of the agency’s stingy pension. If she could only manage that trick somehow, then she’d be free to tell the psychiatrist enough was enough and his services were no longer required, thank you very goddamn much. That he could take his kindly, knowing looks and patronizing nods and go fuck himself. Game, set, match. Checkmate. She could stand up and walk out the door for the last and final time and catch a bus back across town. She could score and fix and, as she nodded off in a velvety heroin fog, she could congratulate herself on finally finding the backbone to do what she should have done a long damn time ago. Of course, she knows she won’t. She was never a particularly brave woman, even at her best, and at forty-one Ellison knows that her best is far behind her. Her best is dead and buried. Still, there are days when the fantasy that she might is the only thing that gets her from one excruciating side of these sessions to the other.
The clock ticks. Here we go again.
“How are you doing today?”
The psychiatrist stops staring at the screen of his pad and stares at Ellison instead. The man is at least old enough to be her father. He has great bushy eyebrows that remind her of Gandalf or Walt Whitman. She’s wondered if maybe he’s one of the shrinks who worked on MK-Ultra or the Stargate Project or some other long-ago covert psychofuck operation or if maybe he has no idea whatsoever who actually writes his checks. Maybe he’s exactly who the diplomas on the wall say he is and no more. Maybe he’s no one much at all. Possibly, he’s the single least interesting man Ellison Nicodemo has ever met and the most subversive thing the psychiatrist ever did was vote for Goldwater in 1972. But it’s got to be one or the other. Either he’s an agency man following a carefully prepared script, minding protocol to the letter, or he’s a patsy who really does believe she isn’t anything more exciting than a junkie and a profoundly delusional schizophrenic who only thinks she used to be some sort of top-secret occult assassin for a shadow government and he only plays the game because the checks don’t bounce.
He can’t be both or anything in between. Albany has never been one for half measures. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Last time,” he says, “you told me that today maybe we
